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When Siri debuted in 2011, she was groundbreaking. Suddenly, each
shiny new iPhone came with a virtual assistant, there to answer
questions, take orders or just chat.

Siri's limitations, however, were quickly revealed. While she
could respond to direct one sentence requests (Call Sarah's home
phone) or answer simple questions (What time is it in
California?), even seemingly straightforward demands (Locate the
nearest Pinkberry) tripped her up. Soon, she became most useful
as party fodder, passed around so guests could laugh at her
programmed answers to philosophical questions.

“I’m extremely proud of Siri and the impact it’s had on the
world, but in many ways it could have been more,” Adam Cheyer,
one of the co-founders of Siri told Wired. “Now I want to do
something bigger than mobile, bigger than consumer, bigger
than desktop or enterprise. I want to do something that could
fundamentally change the way software is built.”

In an attempt to do this Cheyer and fellow Siri co-founder
Dag Kittlaus, along with Chris Brigham (an early hire for the
Siri team), are developing a new digital assistant that
can handle complicated requests, using a crowdsourced
approach. Instead of developing the system inside Apple, however,
the group has broken out on its own to found the startup Viv
Labs.

As hinted above, the central difference between Siri and Viv
Labs' AI system (appropriately named Viv) is that Siri's
responses are pre-programmed, while Viv is designed to learn
as it goes, collecting an ever-expanding database of knowledge
and abilities. The more people use Viv, the smarter it gets.
(It's kind of like the Waze of personal-assistant apps.)

Wired reported that Viv can already tackle complex
requests, ones that would stump both Siri and Google Now
(Google's artificial intelligence, or AI, system): "You can
[ask Google Now], ‘What is the population?’ of a city and
it’ll bring up a chart and answer," Kittlaus told the
outlet. "But you cannot say, 'What is the population of the city
where Abraham Lincoln was born?'"

The problem, Wired reported, is that while Siri and
other AI systems can answer each individual component of the
above question, they lack the sophistication to interpret
their combined meaning. For example, Siri can't respond to
the request "Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq
could fit in." Viv can, however, by breaking apart the
sentence into key words and accessing outside sites for
information on each component -- in this case flights to Dallas
(Kayak), available seats (SeatGuru) and Shaq's dimensions (NBA
guide).

Because Viv will not have a preexisting user base (unlike Siri
and Google Now), it will be an open system, accessible as a
plug-in solution to a large variety of companies and, the
founders hope, available on a variety of devices. "Let me just
cut through all the usual founder bullshit,” told Kittlaus
Wired. “What we’re really after is ubiquity. We want
this to be everywhere, and we’re going to consider all paths
along those lines.” There is no word on when it will officially
launch.

This is all cool, of course, but for now its Viv remains an
untested possibility, one that will have to contend with stiff
competition as the AI space continues to heat up (Google
Microsoft, and Apple are all reportedly working on improving
their AI assistants).

Still, it’s interesting to get a glimpse of how an actually
intelligent AI system (sorry, Siri) would work.